I attended a Jhourney retreat earlier this year. It was hard, and also very powerful. I cried as much as I can remember crying in my adult life. Here’s my report.

Kill your darlings: One piece of writing advice I can’t stop revisiting.

A somewhat-famous internet blogger recently authored a post about “POSIWID” (“The purpose of a system is what it does). It’s a lazy and underwhelming post so I won’t bother linking it, but it did spark some interesting discussion about what people actually mean when they make the assertion that “the purpose of a system is what it does.” Reflecting on this conversation – and on my own relationship to the “POSIWID” meme, especially as it sometimes pops up on Twitter, Mastodon and their ilk – I’ve noticed (at least) two distinct sentiments that the POSIWID meme can denote, and that these dual meanings can result in people talking past each other, and causing (some) of the confusion and/or ill will in these fights....

We recently decided it was time to get a baby gate for the nursery door. After brief research, we ordered the Wirecutter’s recommended unit. It arrived, we looked at the instructions, decided it would be mildly annoying and time-consuming to install, and hired a handyman we’d worked with before to mount it to the door (parenting really steeply shifts your willingness to trade money for time). He did the install while I was out of the house at work....

Some implications of military theory for the Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom

Some notes on both LARPing and IFS and an idiosyncratic discussion of my experience of both.

I played Slayed the Spire in cardboard! Here’s how it went.

Some experience-report notes on things I find weird about meditation.